I have now finished to move the server to the new provider. I will be busy in the coming days to properly setup all the other stuff that is on the server, email accounts migration etc. After that I will be able to care about the shop manager and other stuff that is not finished right now.

We have now much more RAM and processing power as described before. I will see what I can do to use this optimally for the server. There is a potential that we can increase mob spawning rates and other things. I will try to dial the limits up over the coming days and see how that affects server performance.

I also re-setup the off-site backup now and made sure that we back up the databases and the files once a day. On top of that, the new server has RAID 1 dual HDs for the SSD and the normal HD on the server. Since the server is located on the SSD and I make a mirror on the HD, we have now 5 different places where the data is stored. So unless a meteorite hits somewhere or I do something incredibly stupid, we should be good :)

FYI, what happened on the previous server. At the time, I had a free account for the off-site backup which had limited storage space. I made the decision at the time to only store the weekly backups of the files offline since they take a lot of space. In the meantime I bought an account for the offsite backup for private reasons (to have a backup of my photos) and therefore now also have enough space for the daily files of the minecraft server. What happened on the old server was most likely a defect HD controller. Still now, after I got new HDs, there are still issues. Since the provider has a policy to replace both HDs in case one fails, the main HD was ruined when he connected it to the external connector. The fact that they did not give me a complete new server when I negotiated for a new 2 year lease, was the trigger for me to look for an alternative provider, luckily I found one.

Please see the latest upgrades from the voting system:

• stephdeg (from CitizenDonatorPlus to ArchitectDonatorPlus)

Congratz and thanks to all voters!

So while on the surface, the server has been running fine with the new harddisks, I discovered that the brand new seconday HD has issues again. I am quite fed up with this and started to shop around for alternative offers and found one from 1&1. So I signed up for a new server which will be faster, more RAM and will have even an SSD for overall less money per month. Sicne the contract with GoDaddy just expired I won’t pay double. So in summary we will get:

• 12 Cores instead of 4
• 32GB fully usable RAM instead of 8GB Ram (4 usable due to Ramdisk)
• 240GB SSD
• CentOS 7 instead of 6

I will prepare the new server once it is setup and then try to make a move with as little downtime as possible. I will make an post here once we are ready.

Yay!

On Sunday morning, I got an error when the daily backup routine was supposed to run. It basically told me that the files could not be written. Looking at the file destination, it was clear that the 2nd HD that I use for backups was not accessible, all the data was gone.

I contacted tech support at the provider and asked them for help. They recommended rebooting the server to see if that would bring the drive back. It did not. The whole server would not come back online. They then told me that they would have to take out both HDs, install a new system with new HDs and attach the old ones to the system via USB so I could get back the data.

That failed, too. The old backup HD did not even spin up, the main HD would spin up but would not be recognized by the system. The whole process until then had taken from 10:00am until 8pm. I then started to download offsite backups (several Gigabytes) from the internet to my local PC and then again upload them to the server. That basically took the night.

I am now working on getting the minecraft server back up.

What was lost?

• World & inventory data from 10-19th September: I could not restore the daily backup but only the weekly one. So whatever was built, in your inventory or otherwise stored on the server is reset. I am sorry about that. t seems that the off-site backup was misconfigured to not save the daily but only the weekly data. Of course I will fix that once the server is back up.
• The darklands: This is as announced. Since the darklands is much too big due to exploration, It was never backed up and therefore cannot be restored. We will re-generate it. I am not sure if we use the same world id or not.
• The Nether: Same as the darklands. The only thing that I made a backup some days ago is Daiyas monster-build (23rd of August).
• System information: While this does not affect users directly, a lot of the config files on the server were lost. I will have to re-create a lot of stuff and re-configure things to get them up and running again. I assume that this will be 1-2 full days of work to get things going again.

What was not lost?

• Everything in a database. The database that I could restore was the version from Saturday, so it should be pretty much up to date (10 hours or so lost max, nothing that affects you if you did not log in since then). This means your shop, deposit, money lots etc are pretty much up to date.

What did we win?

• Glow stone: Since the nether was reset, you can get glow stone now easily again
• Fortresses: Since the Darklands was reset, you can now get materials from the fortresses again – if you are fast enough.

Again, I am sorry for anything that was lost. I was taken by surprise that both HDs failed at the same time. I never expected that to happen and I have vague suspicions that the tech guys at the provider somehow screwed the main HD up when they disconnected it. I guess it’s a risk to take when using a cheap hoster. I have looked around for a long time for alternative hosters but the costs are normally double if not triple. The fact that I have to manage all by myself and don’t have anyone to check on what I am doing is not helping as you can see, since I am not that experienced when hosting things. Lessons learned. I will try to be more prepared for future crashes.

The 3D map is back online. It was down because I enabled some generic security features on the website which conflicted with the map software. I was able now to customize the system to re-enable the map.

I have removed the in-game ticket system now completely and created a new command /ticket that instead of creating a ticket with the old system, sends an in-game email to me. I will remove the website parts of the ticket system also soon.

We are using a ticket system that is combined between a 3rd party system for wordpress (the website) and a backend for the in-game system that I wrote. The issue is that the website part gets updated often, and each time I can only hope that nothing vital was changed that requires me to re-write the in-game part.

Since I finished the in-game mail system now and since it also has a web-front-end, I will be disabling the ticket system, since it’s essentially the same functionality. I will keep the web functionality for some time to make sure old tickets are being worked on, but the in-game part will be retired first.

More issues were discovered. I am about to fix it. ETA unknown.

I have now removed all offers of inactive users from the shop. All users had their items moved to their deposit. Future users who have their lots reset will also have their items moved to the deposit. Requests are deleted. Thanks to khyddinamaani for the suggestion.

I re-opened the shop now. Since I had to change a lot of the code, please test transactions before you buy/sell for millions of Uncs :)

I was working in the shop finalization for another needed upgrade from item numbers to item names. Unfortunately I am right now over the weekend unexpectedly with other matters so it might take some more time until the shop will get reopened. Sorry for that, I will try to find time ASAP.

Please see the latest upgrades from the voting system:

• bdecima (from CitizenDonatorPlus to ArchitectDonatorPlus)

Congratz and thanks to all voters!

I have been working again more on the shop & the shop manager. One thing to be done is to convert the shop & the deposit overall from numeric item IDs to item names. The next thing is to finalize the shop manager.

For the transformation to item names, I have just now finished the deposit box. The shop still has to be done and is therefore currently offline. This should not take too long I hope.

Since the shop manager is currently only displaying information (I hope it will be possible to buy & sell stuff there sooner or later), I change things there on-the-go and this means that for some of the items you might get an empty screen or some errors. In that case, just ignore it and wait for it to be fixed, it’s all a part of the process.

Please read my opinion here.

Please see the latest upgrades from the voting system:

• Sleeping_Owl (from MasterDonatorPlus to ElderDonatorPlus)

Congratz and thanks to all voters!

The Shop is open again, sorry for the long(-ish) downtime. I hope everything works. If you can help me and test the various functions with small transactions, it would be good.

I have removed various commands such as trends and so on since those will be in the near future on the Shop Manager page.

I got stuck in the Shop update and needed to do something different for a moment. It’s quite complicated and stretches through the whole code so I had to take a break.

So I upgraded the mail function to UUID and finished the web frontend to get my mind on something else.you can now see all your mails on the website and write new ones, delete, reply etc.

The biggest new function however is that you can now have alerts sent to your email address. If you have those switched on, every new in-game mail will be sent to your email address. You cannot reply through email of course since we do no disclose other user’s emails. But you can click on a link in the notification to see the email on the website and reply there. I wanted to finish that since quite a while and now finally it’s done!

Expect the shop to be finished within tomorrow.

I have upgraded and re-activated Tapatalk which allows you to use our forum from a mobile device. It’s a free app for users, we paid to make it available on the server, so please use it!

I have now upgraded the Deposit to UUIDs. It’s not as complicated, but the Shop is a different animal, so it’s still under construction. I want to make sure that I don’t have a mistake somewhere that makes someone lose they marbles blocks.

Bukkit is a server project that converts the vanilla minecraft server into something that can use plugins. It’s the main base for many minecraft serves and for all the plugins we are using. Spigot is a derivative of Bukkit built for higher performance. We used to run Bukkit for a long time and switched to Spigot some months ago since it’s better for lag prevention.

While Bukkit was taken over by Mojang quite some time ago, Spigot was not. Both projects distribute the server code with it. Since Spigot does not have the right to do so, they are violating Minecraft copyright. The worst part of it is that BOTH are distributed as an open source project. And there Minecraft defintely never gave the license to do so. I also assume that since the website Bukkit and it’s plugins are hosted on is a part of the Curse network is another issue, since Curse is making money with ads on the Bukkit pages and therefore essentially profiting from this copyright violation, too.

IANAL (I am not a lawyer) but my take is the following: Bukkit belongs to Mojang. They bought it back in the day when they hired the Bukkit developers. The people who have been distributing Bukkit over the last months however do not work for Mojang. Spigot has been taking that work and distributed it again. With the fact that Mojang included the new EULA since the last version already, and now will start do develop the Bukkit code themselves, they want to stop any further other outside parties to infringe on their rights. They are making a clear cut with version 1.8 and want to take the server software from this version under their own control, and they very much have the right to do so.

The Spigot admins said they want to get a lawyer, but the only thing the lawer will tell them is to shut down their site and be happy they do not get sued for damages.

Personally, I fully support Mojang in this, in the hope that the release of Bukkit for 1.8 – which they said they would make – does not take ages to release.

Why do I support them?

The main reason we have issues to attract users is that other server which charge 160 USD for people to get a userlevel on the server pump that money into marketing, and server lists auction off the top spots on their lists for thousands of USD. It’s money for nothing and an economy built on copyright violations that thrives from teenagers stealign their mom’s credit card in order to boost their egos on servers that host 2000 people – all built on copyright and license violations.

And this is also the main reason why we are behind in donations. Because many people who would be able and willing to give money, rather give it to servers where they can buy themselves whatever their equivalent for Elder level is.

We can continue running 1.7.10 until Bukkit will be released for 1.8. Depending on how long that takes, we can make intermediate decisions. However, there is still a HUGE amount of work to be done from my side to make the server ready for 1.8. For example, the whole lot management still does not run on UUIDs since the Worldguard version that would support this is not released yet.